Nearly every household provided with electrical service has, at an entryway for electrical service, a watt-hour meter for monitoring the consumption of electrical energy in the household. A principal requirement there is positive electrical contact between the meter and its socket, which may be located in a service panel or may be in a plug-in type of adapter between such a meter and such a panel.
Straight blade or spade terminals protruding from the base of the meter housing slidably engage socket jaws within such a panel or adapter. The jaws occur in individual pairs spring-biased together to ensure a good electrical contact with an intervening blade. Such bias is often provided by means of the configuration or the material of one or both jaws in a pair, but the need to conduct electricity very well limits the available materials. A customary arrangement combines a heavy relatively rigid jaw having a flat blade-receiving surface and a lighter S-curved jaw having one convex side pressing against such flat rigid surface of the cooperating jaw. However, as the curved contacting surface is quite limited in extent, a hot spot tends to develop there, to the detriment of the spring-bias and the electrical conduction. Improved plug-in connectors with cooperating jaws are needed, and my invention meets that need.